He checked his course toward the Israel’s midship maintenance airlock, found it good, and pulled out his welding torch, holding it in a white-knuckle grip.
The ship swelled until it blocked his view in every direction. The airlock hatch resolving from a tiny slightly lighter dot to a thumbnail-sized square to an actual door with a small round window in it. The pre-programmed EVA pack fired off a long blast of nitrogen in four cones of vapor, and he drifted to a gentle stop a meter away.
The welding rig came to life with a burst of bright blue fire. “Here I come,” Basia said to Naomi and to the RCE people guarding her and to his baby girl thousands of kilometers away on her dying ship.
Here I come.
Chapter Forty: Havelock
“I’ve shut down everything I can,” Marwick said on the screen. “Sensors, lights, entertainments. I’ve dialed back the cooling. With the batteries being what they are, I’ll give us just under seventeen days. And that’s with the solar collectors up at full. Less than that if they start failing. After that, it’ll be time to decide whether we’d rather suffocate or burn.”
Havelock rubbed his forefinger and thumb deep into his eye sockets. He hadn’t gone to the gym, and he was trying to make up for it by increasing the cocktail of null-g steroids. It wasn’t a long-term fix, but the more he looked at it, the less it seemed like he’d need one of those. It did give him a headache, though. If it hadn’t been for Naomi, he wouldn’t have spent as much time exercising as he had. Something to thank her for.
His office felt stuffy and close, and the temperature was climbing steadily. As a boy living planetside, he’d always thought of space as cold, and while that was technically true, mostly it was a vacuum. And so a ship, mostly, was a thermos. The heat from their bodies and systems would bleed off into the void over years or decades if it had the chance. If he could find a way to get them the chance.
“Have we mentioned it to the crew?” he asked.
“I haven’t, but the data’s hard to keep secret. Especially when it’s a can full of scientists and engineers with little enough else to do. We’re going to need to talk about dropping them. As many as we can.”
“So that they can starve and die on the planet if the moons don’t shoot them down?”
“Most part, yes,” Marwick said. “They’ve come a long way not to put foot on the surface. There’s more than one I know would prefer dying there.”
In her cage, Naomi coughed.
“I’ll talk to Murtry,” Havelock said. “Having a graveyard on the planet might be something he’d want. Especially if we could get more bodies in it than the squatters have.”
Marwick sighed. He’d stopped shaving, and when he rubbed his chin it sounded like someone throwing a handful of sand at a window. “We came close, though, didn’t we? All the way out here to start the whole damned world up again.”
“We saw the promised land,” Havelock said. “What about the Barbapiccola? What’s her situation?”
“Makes ours look good. That lithium ore’s going to be a high-atmosphere vapor in a little over four days.”
“Well, I guess we won’t need to worry about stopping them from taking it back to the market.”
“Problem’s about to solve itself,” Marwick agreed. “But to the point. Security? These people are facing a death they can’t fight and they can’t flee from. They’re going to get crazy if we don’t do something. And neither you nor I have the manpower to stop them if things get out of control.”
What would it matter? Havelock wanted to say. Let them riot. It won’t change how long before we hit air. Not even by a minute.
“I hear you,” he said. “I do have the security override codes. I’ll have the autodoc add a little tranquilizer and mood stabilizer, maybe some euphorics to everyone’s cocktail. I don’t want to do much, though. I need these people thinking straight, not doped to the gills.”
“If that’s how you want to play it.”
“I’m not putting this ship on hospice. Not yet.”
The captain’s shrug was eloquent, and left nothing more to say. Havelock dropped the connection. The screen went to its default. Despair rushed up over him like a rogue wave. They had done everything right, and it didn’t matter. They were all going to die – all the people he’d come to help protect, all the people on his team, his prisoner, himself, everyone. They were going to die and there wasn’t anything he could do about it but get them high before it happened.
He didn’t know he was going to punch the screen until he’d already done it. The panel shifted in its seating a little, but he hadn’t left a mark on it. The gimbals of his crash couch hissed as they absorbed the momentum. He’d split his knuckle. A drop of blood welled on his skin, growing to the size of a dark red marble, the surface tension pulling it out along his skin as he watched. When he moved, he left a spray of droplets hanging in the air like little planets and moons.
“You know,” Naomi said, “if you’re looking at hundreds of people burning to death as a problem solving itself, that may be more evidence that you’re on wrong side.”
“We didn’t plant the bombs,” Havelock said. “That was them. They started it.”
“Does that matter to you?”
“At this point? Not as much as it probably should.”
Naomi was floating close to her cage door. He was always amazed at a Belter’s capacity to endure small spaces. Probably claustrophobia had been selected out of their gene pool. He wondered how many generations of Naomi’s family had lived up the well.
“You’re bleeding,” she said.
“Yep. That’s not going to matter much either.”
“You know you could let me out. I’m a very good engineer, and I have the best ship out here. Get me back on the Roci, and I might be able to figure out a way to make things better.”
“Not going to happen.”
“And here I thought it didn’t matter to you,” she said with a smile in her voice.
“I don’t know how you can be so calm about all this.”
“It’s what I do when I’m scared. And really, you should let me out.”
Havelock gathered the blood out of the air. His knuckle had scabbed over already. He logged into the autodoc with the sick sense of taking the first step toward giving up. But it had to be done. A crew full of panicking people wasn’t going to make anything better. Especially since the closest thing he had to a full staff was down on the planet with Murtry.